1. Introduction
The Government of Vietnam has requested World Bank to finance the Vietnam Inclusive Innovation Project (VIIP) (herein refer to as the Project). The Project will focus on development of high-performance and affordable solutions to address the needs of the Base of Pyramid population, including through providing support to SMEs to acquire, adopt, create and use of technology and innovation.
The VIIP will comply with applicable Vietnamese environmental regulations and the World Bank Environmental and Social and Safeguard Policies. By design, the Project will not finance any innovations and technologies which cause significant adverse environmental and social impacts. Potential impacts, if there is any, would not be irreversible and will be at low and medium scale, mitigable and manageable. The project therefore has been classified as category B and an Environmental and Social Management Framework (ESMF) is developed by EDA as part of Project preparation to ensure that all the financed subprojects corresponding to innovative technology development/adaptation/creation would be implemented in an environmentally and socially sustainable manner.
The ESMF will screen all innovation technologies to determine their eligibility regarding environmental and social safeguards. The ESMF includes a procedure to develop and implement relevant measures to mitigate the impacts; specifies institutional arrangement, cost for implementing screening, preventive, mitigation measure and monitoring.
The ESMF will be integrated into the Project Operational Manual and deliberately reflected in the subproject application forms to ensure that environmental and social issue will be considered together with other requirement during project implementation.
1.1 Project description:
Project Objectives
The Project Development Objective (PDO) is to adopt, upgrade and develop inclusive innovations for the benefit of the Base of Pyramid (BoP) population. This will be achieved by strengthening Vietnam's capacity to undertake inclusive innovation, including financing development, adaptation, adoption, scaling up and commercialization of inclusive technologies, and improving Research and Development Institutions’ (RDIs’) and Small and Medium Enterprises’ (SMEs’) technological and innovation capabilities thereby enhancing their competitiveness
Project Components
The project with an IDA Credit of US$55 million will consist of the following four components:
i. Developing Inclusive Technologies
ii. Scaling up and Commercialization of Inclusive Technologies
iii. Capacity Building and Global Knowledge Transfer
iv. Project Management, Monitoring and Evaluatio